Sunday, March 24, 2013

That's one way of looking at it...

From our Sunday editorial commenting on the results of a new Joyce Foundation/Tribune poll on reform of public education:

Tuition vouchers. There's significant support for this concept but also strong opposition: Almost half of the respondents (46.5 percent) support efforts to give tuition vouchers to parents with children in consistently underperforming schools, so those kids can attend parochial or other private schools. But 47.8 percent oppose vouchers. The bottom line: Supporters need to do a better job of selling this idea.

Of course a different bottom-line conclusion from this split would be that opponents of vouchers need to do a better job discrediting this idea, which certain prominent former backers have come to reject for the threat it poses to the concept of public education and the way it uses tax dollars to support religious education, among other reasons.

All depends on how you look at it, I guess.

Posted at 10:54:05 PM

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Here in WI we already have open enrollment - so that exposes the real reasons as paying for parochial and siphoning off money from public. What a place we've come to - half the population campaigning for the end to public education in the name of increasing corporate profits and major news outlets telling us we need to do a better job of messaging that.

Why stop at teachers? Rahm could supplement police officers with mall cops. Chicago residents could be required to take a shift at their local fire station. Maybe have a course in bus and train driving once you've received your DL.

Yet another bottom line: There appears to be room for a solid majority to get behind a program that provided vouchers but not for religious instruction -- unless a large portion of the current support comes from people motivated exactly by the desire to have government fund religious instruction who would not be interested in a program that merely educated children. This program would not rule out the Catholic Church or other religious groups from participating, of course, if they wished to run non-religious schools as a matter of charity or public service. They would only be excluded if they chose to opt out by determining that educating about their religious beliefs is an essential part of any schools they would care to run. In that case, I sincerely have no problem with them providing that education to children whose parents want it. It's just not something that should be funded by the government any more than a bar mitzvah tutor should be.

The staunchest opponents of school vouchers are well-to-do urban liberals who pay to send their own children to private school. Naturally, they do not want hordes of children of the great unwashed getting into the private schools for free.

One can always appreciate the tunnel-vision of the Tribune editorial board on vouchers and charters, which have yet to prove they're as or more effective than public schools that can participate in selective enrollment....or NOT.

They just can't get why the majority of people don't support their 100% sure-fire solutions to CPS and Chicago's children.

Actually, as an urban liberal who I guess has to be statistically characterized as well-to-do, even though we certainly do not feel like it most of the time, I would be thrilled both to have the government pick up some/all of our kids' tuition *and* to have more economic/racial diversity in our kids' private school.

I think the school would be thrilled on both counts, too. I am sure it is not doing all it could to actively recruit a more diverse student population but that is different from not wanting it. As far as money, while I am sure it would not be able to absorb large numbers of kids who could not pay -- whether with their parents' funds or vouchers -- at the margin I think it would find the financial aid very quickly to add more if they applied and met academic standards. That is not to say it could not look harder. I am sure it could. Maybe I am fooling myself but knowing the general political feel of the school (definitely a lot of financial conservatives but socially quite progressive), I don't think it is wanting to exclude people different from the current student mix as much as perhaps not putting it as high on the very-long list of initiatives any school has as it might. If you choose to criticize that, fair enough.

So, on both us and the school, I categorically reject Jimmy G's overall assessment (cannot speak to other schools) but certainly there is room to hold a lot of people -- liberal and conservative -- to account for not being active enough in turning principle into concrete action. You cannot do everything but it is easy to make excuses and let oneself off the hook. You have, in fact, tapped into some liberal guilt here -- not on your actual claim, which is as ham-handed and wrong as most of what you claim to believe about the left -- but about not doing enough to take positive action in the other direction.

@Pan - What about current selective enrollment public schools? I would agree that you cannot let admission standards become a fig leaf for discrimination but I don't have a problem with schools truly having academic standards for admission.

Everyone in my family are big supporters of public schools, not charters. We all went to one, and all the kids in the family now go to one too. Even back when I went to school some parents paid to send their kids to parochial schools, but still paid for the public schools because it was "for the public good". Many kids also went to the public school & went to catechism on Wed afternoons. None of these were private, for-profit schools. If you want to see how well rampant privatization & for-profit schools with vouchers are doing, check out Louisiana.

"Suburban people, by and large, are perfectly happy with their eeevil gummint schools, thank you very much,"

Suburban people tend to be happy with their public schools because they voted with their feet to put their children in schools that draw from middle class and upper middle class neighborhoods. That was exactly what I did because I could not afford to send my kids to private school.

Suburban people tend to oppose vouchers because they have no empathy with urban kids who would benefit from vouchers. They tend to take an "I've got mine" attitude.

ZORN REPLY -- Indeed, watch support for vouchers evaporate if they're deemed to be valid at suburban public schools.
Intended or not, vouchers will prop up religious schools, eviscerate public schools and erode the teachers unions.

I'm not sure where people think all of these city kids are supposed to go with their magical vouchers. Will Francis Parker of the Lab School increase class sizes and build new buildings to handle all those new students? Or, will this be viewed as a business opportunity and new private schools would start popping up all over? Maybe some of those charter school operators would switch the charters over to private schools?

Sorry, late to the party because I'm on vacation, but this is the push-poll I quoted from at length previously with at least half a dozen factually incorrect statements, not to mention plenty more that were misleading. So whatever support these results show for voucher, charters, etc. is vastly overstated and based on misinformation.

As a matter of fact, of my 6 nieces & nephews, the eldest (she's 27 now) went to both a CPS grade school & high school. The 2 nephews either are going or went to a CPS grade school; the older of the 2 goes to CPS HS. My sister (their mother) is principal of yet another CPS school. My 2 other nieces live in Northbrook (they didn't particularly choose it because of the schools; my brother-in-law grew up there & his aunt lives across the street), go to public school there. The littlest niece starts kindergarten in the fall. The CPS school we all went to is an "academy", a lottery "magnet" school that is only selective in that sense, but not by testing or anything else. They're waiting to see if she can go there, otherwise, the other local school is really good too (my principal sister thinks that principal is really great). But it will be a CPS school.

We still know that the real issue is poverty (the Sun-Times gets it; I don't think the Trib believes in public schools or that everyone REALLY deserves to be educated), and that until the issues or poverty & homelessness are solved or at least mitigated, improvement in some schools will be slow in coming, and you're not going to see a dramatic improvement by teaching to the test & taking up all that learning time with that incessent testing.

All we want for kids in Chicago is what Rahm wants & gets for his kids - a school that has small(ish) class sizes, a rich curriculum, up-to-date books & equipment, and not too much testing (that school doesn't believe in it) so that they can actually LEARN to think for themselves & not just spit up answers when required.

And MCN, I still believe what Jefferson believed about education. Even in these times.

JimmyG: As Eric implies, your argument can be turned on its head. Why should suburban parents blandly consign the city public schools to the tender mercies of a voucher system while holding their own public schools sacrosanct?

MCN: If public school educators make six-figure salaries, why didn't you become one?

"Why should suburban parents blandly consign the city public schools to the tender mercies of a voucher system while holding their own public schools sacrosanct?"

I do not have the statistics but I would venture to say that virtually no educated middle class white or Asian people who live in Bucktown, Wicker Park or Logan Square send their children to the neighborhood public school. Vouchers would subsidize those people to use private schools. Why should suburbanites want to do that?

About "Change of Subject."

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Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.